The Triangular Trade

Grade: 5
Subject: Social Studies
Date: October 2020
Topic: Triangular Trade
 

Triangular Trade

Slave ships from Britain left ports like London, Liverpool and Bristol for West Africa carrying goods
 such as cloth, guns, ironware and drink that had been made in Britain.
Later, on the West African coast, these goods would be traded for men, women and children who had 
been captured by slave traders or bought from African chiefs.
African dealers kidnapped people from villages up to hundreds of miles inland. 
They marched the captives to the coast where they would be traded for goods.
 The prisoners would be forced to march long distances, with their hands tied behind their backs and 
their necks connected by wooden yokes.
On the African coast, European traders bought enslaved peoples from travelling African
 dealers or nearby African chiefs. Families were separated.
The traders held the enslaved Africans until a ship appeared, and then sold them to a European
 or African captain.
 It often took a long time for a captain to fill his ship. 
He rarely filled his ship in one spot.
 Instead he would spend three to four months sailing along the coast, looking for the fittest 
and cheapest slaves.
Ships would sail up and down the coast filling their holds with enslaved Africans. 
On the brutal Middle Passage, enslaved Africans were stuffed and forced onto ships that
 would carry them to the West Indies.
The Middle Passage
 was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of Africans were forcibly transported
 to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade.
In the West Indies enslaved Africans would be sold to the highest bidder at slave auctions.
Once they had been bought, enslaved Africans worked for nothing on plantations.
They were like any other possession, and had no rights at all. 
The enslaved Africans were often punished very harshly.
Two thirds of the enslaved Africans, taken to the Americas, ended up on sugar plantations. 
Sugar was used to sweeten another crop harvested by enslaved Africans in the
 West Indies - coffee.